Interlude
by EssayOfThoughts
Summary: Having someone return from the dead is not usual, or expected, even for superpowered superheroes, super-spies, and a Norse god. Sequel to Dis Manibus which is in turn a sequel to Shattered Dreams and Broken Stele, in turn a sequel to The Dead Do Not Bury Themselves. Part 4 of my Memento Mori Series


**Summary:**

Having someone return from the dead is not usual, or expected, even for superpowered superheroes, super-spies, and a Norse god.

* * *

 **The Twins**

 _We know how we are_ , Wanda sends to Pietro one day. _They do not._ Pietro nods, but does not feel a need to say anything. _They will want to analyse us_ , Wanda sends, _And I do not doubt they will judge us wrong_.

Pietro's smirk is small, but there. _They would be the wrong ones._

Wanda's smile is amused, more than anything, eyes lit up with it, her smile a small quirk at the edge of her lips. _They may have a point. I nearly went mad, without you. I don't think they would wish to invite that on us all in a battle again._

Pietro's hand strokes over Wanda's hair, tucks back strands of hair, and tidies her braid. _You will be able to bring me back, if it comes to it,_ He sends, nothing but firm certainty. _And I will flee to your mind, if it happens again, so I will be whole and entire, and not remade of fragments_.

Wanda turns, and looks at her brother. _And what if I am gone?_

* * *

 **Andrej**

Some evenings, when Pietro was sleeping, Wanda would slip from her bed to Andrej's new room. With Pietro's return they'd finally finished arranging the new room for Snowsmoke, and though he could get his own cigarettes now he and Wanda would still meet, and still share a smoke to talk of the day. Andrej taps up news articles on his tablet, and points.

"They call it the Battle of Sokovia," he says, and Wanda laughs.

"Fools," she says, in Sokovian. "To think they fought for a whole nation, when it was the city. How small do they think countries in Europe are? We are not all Vaticans."

Andrej grins. "You should see some of the other news they do. They big themselves up like a raven trying to impress a blackbird."

"Americans." Wanda snorts. "Like to think themselves so essential. Pietro would tell them off quite loudly."

The words slip between them, swift Sokovian, harsh if spoken stiltedly, but when with speed the words find a flow that Wanda knows Andrej finds soothing. Andrej stubs his cigarette out on the small ashtray by his bed, and breathes ice into the air, dissipating the cloud of smoke.

"I'd go outside but it's too warm," he says, wrinkling his nose. "I don't like the way it builds up inside."

"It stagnates," Wanda says, stroking a hand over Andrej's hair, as the boy leans against her. "It doesn't circulate. It can through a city and down the streets. Even the dead ends had their howling winds."

Andrej smiles, yellowed teeth distinct against his lips, "Even minds have winds, and they are rooms of their own."

Wanda shakes her head, "Not exactly. They are. They are not rooms. They are more like islands. They are all different, and distinct from the water, but they are open to the air."

The pale blond head shifts, and Andrej's pale eyes look up at Wanda. "What about your mind, and your brother's?"

It is a half-amused breath Wanda breathes out. "A bridge," she says. "We are sibling islands which built a bridge to join us together. It would take an earthquake to break us apart."

* * *

 **Vision**

Some evenings Wanda goes to stand on the roof again. When Andrej has finally gone to sleep, breathing soft clouds of ice into the air, and letting traceries of frost fill his room, she heads to the roof, and stands, toes at the edge, as though she might pitch over and hope her scarlet would catch her.

On such evenings Vision joins her.

"Are you connected to the system?" she asks one evening. "You are here every time I am."

He shrugs cloaked shoulders. "I have little need for sleep. I might as well offer you company if I can. You are free to refuse it." Vision half-gestures to the door but Wanda shakes her head.

"You are good company," she says with a smile. "Stay."

Vision joins her at the edge of the roof, and, for a while, they are quiet.

"Have you ever tried to count the stars?" Wanda asks, when the silence has gone on for uncounted minutes.

"When I was younger," Vision says, a slight smile adorning his lips. "Only a few days old. I thought it must be possible, despite what the data had said. Parables and scientists, but all from humans. I wondered if I might, without need for sleep, and eyesight surpassing all but telescopes."

"It is hard," Wanda says.

"Yes. But it is worth it. I learned the constellations, like that, and tried to make a few of my own."

"Oh?" Wanda glances away from the skies. She looks at Vision with interest, curiosity dancing in her expression. Vision raises an arm.

"Those could be a cormorant, sunning its wings, see the way they could make a curving line?" Wanda follows his gaze, steps closer to sight down his arm, and nods. Vision's arm moves westward. "And those… you cannot see now, the cloud there, but without it it could almost be a scythe, separate from Orion."

"Orion has a scythe?"

Vision smiles, and his arm drops. "Is a scythe, in some stories. Other stories say there are camels in the sky, as well as dragons and a plough."

"Do you know the twins? Gemini?"

Vision nods. "Castor and Pollux. I know them."

Wanda's smile turns almost sad. "Do you know the story of them?"

Vision nods. "One immortal and one not. I thought it was… sad, terribly so."

"They chose though," Wanda says, voice soft. "Pollux sacrificed his immortality to share it with his brother." She is quiet a moment, but it is a weighted one, and Vision does not speak. "I thought Pietro and I were wrong, for a while, in how close we were - all the others in the foster home thought we were..."

"But Pollux and Castor-"

"Proved true what Pietro and I had always thought." Wanda smiles at Vision, and he realises how close they stand, after he had pointed out the constellations he had considered. She speaks on, and Vision is close enough to see the half-tear beading in her eye. "Twins are not meant to live nor die apart."

Vision is quiet, but gently, slowly, reaches to take Wanda's hand. "I cannot imagine," he says, "How it must have been."

Wanda's smile is small, but true. "Be glad," she says. "You will never have to know."

* * *

 **Clint**

Clint watches them from a distance, when he watches them at all. After hauling Pietro's body to the carrier - torn open, riddled with bullets - it weirds him out just enough to see him alive again. They are close as he hadn't seen them at first. He'd seen them apart, Pietro tripping him, or stealing his arrows, or kicking him through a window, and Wanda bespelling people elsewhere. To see them together is different.

Clint perches on balconies over the training gym and watches the twins. They move… like they are each ends of a single staff. Like they are two points at the ends of rope. Like Charon and Pluto, closer to orbiting each other than any other interactions he could see. When Wanda's focus slips, trapped into scarlet or a mindscape it takes only a touch or a glance from her brother to tug her back to the present. When Pietro is about to break rank, break parameters it takes only Wanda touching his hand, sending her scarlet to him, a murmured word, for her brother to stop, to still, to wait. It is not, he knows, dissimilar to how he and Nat have worked in the past. Intrinsic, inherent trust, and the balance that comes with it, as perfect as his arrows.

He does not think either of them have the strength of will to leave one another on job, however, not after Pietro's death.

* * *

 **Sam**

Sam finds them, not creepy, but certainly worrying, if he's perfectly honest. He remembers the trust he'd had with Riley, the reliance that made grief so hard to bear, and knows it is a thousand times worse for the twins. He had only a few years working with Riley. The twins have had a lifetime with each other.

In training they work well together, but not quite so well apart. Wanda seems distracted without her brother to anchor her, and Pietro seems jittery without her at his side. Together they work with a synchronicity that would make any set of partners jealous.

Sometimes, in training, they worry him. When they are divided into teams they can never work against each other, no matter what they try. When working together though… targeting Wanda gets Pietro running circles, sucking air away, stealing weapons, pinching bullets, and running constant interference. Targeting Pietro turns Wanda's eyes so bright a red it looks like they are blood, and her scarlet rises around her like great clawed wings.

Sam remembers the reports that spoke of her eyes glowing when she took apart minds, and decides to avoid anything that might make her want to try.

* * *

 **Nat**

The twins, Nat thinks, are so close as to be the same, and yet somehow still distinct. They are like precious gems, both valuable, both brilliant, both complementary to each other, and yet, all the same, distinct. Like snow and hail, like fire and embers, like bonfires burning through the deepest winter. They make sense together, and do not so much make sense apart. It is odd, she notes, that when Wanda grieved when her brother died it was as though she had lost her own self, and that now he is back she seems as full of life as any.

Sometimes she worries about them, and tries to push it away, before she remembers that she's allowed to worry again.

* * *

 **Thor**

Thor has seen bonds as close as the twin's one before. There are other brave companions than just his, and some of them have fought for millennia more than he. The closeness they have might be called supernatural by humans, but it is simply born of knowing and understanding for long years, that he knows. He does not doubt their bond is only strengthened by their gifts, with the Witch more than able to link her mind to her brother's, make them as close to one being as two beings can be.

Sometimes Wanda's insight makes him want to compare her to Vör, the wise and careful one, but Wanda is all too quickly lost into her scarlet, her brother's run, the simple turning of the world, to match the Asgardian. Wanda's brother, yet, remains aware, remains alert, when she does not. He half wonders if they are each half of what makes Vör, Vör, all the ancient Asgardian's wisdom, born of awareness and carefulness both. Two halves, making a whole answer to the wise Vör, two halves, watching each other.

Then again, he thinks, watching them in training, they are too interlinked to be divided and too distinct, yet, to be one. They are as he'd first thought, he thinks, brave companions, who've lived their whole lives together, rather than meeting later in life. It does not baffle him terribly, that they are so close, but he does not wish to see one of them sent to Hel's Realm, and the other alone again.

* * *

 **Steve**

"They're weird," Nat says one day, while they're having lunch. They're watching the others – Sam, Rhodes, Vision, and the twins – eating on a lower level, taking advantage of what is, effectively, the officer's mess. Snowsmoke is, as ever, practically glued to Wanda's side, and Pietro sits opposite them both. From the distance they are at the three below look almost like a family, with the twins as parents, and Andrej their child. Maybe Pietro is a bit too distant, maybe Wanda is more like a sister than a mother, when they watch them up close. But from the distance they are at they look like a family.

Briefly Steve wonders if that's how he and Bucky and Peggy had all seemed from a distance. All of them so certain of each other, and Bucky and Steve trusting each other implicitly. Trios, in the form of a shining sun, a living planet, a circling moon. One for one for one, and all interlinked. The loss of one, he knows intimately, can set it all out of balance.

* * *

 **Rhodey**

Rhodey looks at the twins and he's not sure what to make of them. Sometimes he sees Tony in them, Tony with his Tech at least, that odd interdependency of one needing the other to fix it, and the other needing the one to feel right. With Tony and tech it's always made sense – Tony can make tech from pretty much anything, given the tools – but with the twins… it seems odd. Maybe it's because they couldn't make another twin (except they _did_ ). Maybe it's because of the closeness between two _people_.

He's not entirely sure, but he knows he doesn't want to see another wave of smoke-thin scarlet exploding with a scream.

* * *

 **Stark**

Tony Stark doesn't want to notice the twins except he kind of has to. They did, after all, want to kill him, and only held off because doing so would probably have pissed off Ultron even more than the robot was already. Hell, they could have killed him, with Wanda's stunt during the battle, leaving her station. He could have been crushed into the ground as so much pink sludge and metal if he wasn't as smart as he was.

He knows the twins have some weird bond, but that's all it is to him. Weird. He's half-certain that Wanda did something to her brother's brain to keep him in line, programming him to behave within certain parameters, but then he does something that has her yelling or laughing. It doesn't help that Vision seems to like them.

Or that JARVIS is gone.

* * *

 **Maximoff Twins File Excerpt**

 _My overall opinions are that the Maximoff twins support a potentially highly dangerous mutual co-dependency, each relying on one another for comfort, advice and, in the case of Miss Maximoff, possibly sanity too. Furthermore, these views are at least partially backed by the team, who firmly agree that they should not be parted. It is my opinion that, despite their potential uses in the field, they not be permitted free rein on fieldwork until they have started and accepted therapy to help them acknowledge and treat their co-dependency._

 _Signed,_

 ** _Dr. Alana Grey_**

 **Team and Associate Opinions:**

 **Maximoff Twins -** _We work best together, and we do not wish to be parted._

 **Andrej/Snowsmoke -** Don't break them apart. Please.

 **Vision -** Their bond is intrinsic to them. It is as much a part of their minds as their physical brains at this point. To separate them would be more than dangerous - it would be cruel.

 **Clint Barton/Hawkeye -** I don't think they're ready to work yet. Skilled, sure. Advanced, yeah. But they wouldn't abandon each other in the field, even if it was required, and that could mess things up.

 **Sam Wilson/Falcon –** Given we know she's capable of taking apart minds (I know you have the reports, don't ignore them) and that we've seen what she's capable of when she last lost her brother, let's not put either of them at too much risk, ok? It's like trying to make Steve give up on Bucky. I mean, if you've seen these reports, and then try to part them, and they drive you mad or kill you, it's your fault.

[ _Last sentence is underlined twice_ ]

 _Note from Clint:_ Consider me underlining Sam's last sentence again.

 **Natasha Romanov/Black Widow -** _Consider me underlining Sam's last sentence as well. I don't think parting these two is smart, but they do need to separate themselves from each other, on their own ideally. As it is they don't have the mindset to be field agents, let alone Avengers._

 **Thor –** They are not dissimilar to war-brothers and companions on Asgard, except they are also siblings in blood. Pietro is a creature of loyalty, who places his sister before all else. Wanda Maximoff in turn, never takes advantage of this, and advises them both. There are a fair number of Asgardians who do similarly. Harming One never gains favour from the Other.

 **Steve Rogers/Captain America –** Keep them out of fieldwork until the co-dependency is dealt with.

 **Colonel Rhodes/War Machine –** I'm underlining Sam's sentence too. It'd be like separating Tony from his tech. Something's gonna break and only one of them is gonna be them.

 **Tony Stark/Iron Man -** Creepy, fast and not my problem anymore. None of you antagonise them. I don't want either of them waging war on me again - you do remember she let me take the scepter and that's why we had Ultron right?

 **Maria Hill -** I think they need to be tested on their loyalty to S.H.I.E.L.D. and to each other. Need to know what happens when separated by distance, by people, how well they operate apart, how well they operate when separated. Advise testing.

* * *

Reviews are much appreciated!


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